PHP Fatal error: Uncaught exception 'PHPExcel_Calculation_Exception'

Question

can somebody tell me why am I getting this error?

PHP Fatal error:  Uncaught exception 'PHPExcel_Calculation_Exception' with message 'Worksheet!E48 -> Formula Error: An unexpected error occured' in PHPExcel/1.8.0/Classes/PHPExcel/Cell.php:300
Stack trace:
#0 PHPExcel/1.8.0/Classes/PHPExcel/Writer/Excel5/Worksheet.php(460): PHPExcel_Cell->getCalculatedValue()
#1 PHPExcel/1.8.0/Classes/PHPExcel/Writer/Excel5.php(187): PHPExcel_Writer_Excel5_Worksheet->close()
#2 export/the_script.php(98): PHPExcel_Writer_Excel5->save('the_export.xls')
#3 {main}
  thrown in PHPExcel/1.8.0/Classes/PHPExcel/Cell.php on line 300

The code that generates this error:

$excel = new PHPExcel();
$excel->setActiveSheetIndex(0);
$R = $db->query("SELECT col1, col2, col3 from table1");
while($row = $R->fetch(Zend_Db::FETCH_NUM)) {
    $excel->getActiveSheet()->fromArray($row, false, 'A'.$i);
    $i++;
}
$excelWriter = PHPExcel_IOFactory::createWriter($excel, 'Excel5');
$excelWriter->save('the_export.xls');

As you can see, there are no formulas, no nothing... simple dumping of data from database into an excel file... Running PHP 5.3.2

Answer 1

I'm guessing that one of the values retrieved from your database begins with an = sign, in which case PHPExcel will "guess" that it's supposed to be a formula and store it as such.

If you have values that begin with an = that aren't formulae, then you need to tell PHPExcel that it is a string and that it should be stored as such.

This behaviour is defined in the default cell binder (PHPExcel/Cell/DefaultValueBinder.php).

If you want to force PHPExcel to store these values as strings, then you can use the setCellValueExplicit() method (which defaults to enforcing a string)

Or you can write a custom value binder and apply that instead of the default value binder